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Description

In the days when the Bourbon reigned over Gaul, before the simple, sensuous, passionate verse of Alfred de Musset had succeeded the debonnaire Muse of Beranger in the affections of young France, -in days when the site of the Trocadero was a remote and undiscovered country, and the word exposition unkwn in the Academic dictionary, and the Gallic Augustus destined to rebuild the city yet an exile, -a young law-student boarded, in common with other students, in a big dreary-looking house at the corner of the Rue Grande-Mademoiselle, abutting on the Place Lauzun, and within some ten minutes walk of the Luxembourg. It was a very dingy quarter, though ble gentlemen and lovely ladies had once occupied the great ghastly mansions, and disported themselves in the gruesome gardens. But the young students were in wise oppressed by the ghastliness of their abode. They sang their Beranger, and they pledged each other in cheap Bordeaux, and clinked their glasses isily in their boisterous good-fellowship, and ate the messes compounded for them in a darksome cupboard, kwn as the kitchen, by old Nan the cook, purblind, stone-deaf, and all but imbecile, and popularly supposed to be the venerable mother of Madame Magtte. The youngsters grumbled to each other about the messes when they were unusually mysterious; and it must be owned that there were vol-au-vents and fricandeaux consumed in that establishment which were awful and wonderful in their nature; but they ventured on complaint to the mistress of the mansion. She was a grim and terrible personage. Her terms were low, and she treated her boarders de haute en bas. If they were t content with her viands, they might go and find more agreeable viands elsewhere.